Center for Leadership
Studies

As Executive Director of Regulatory Affairs and Quality Audits for Canadian Blood Services, Andy Shaw builds and maintains relationships with a vast number of people both inside and outside his organization. He is head of a team that manages relationships with Health Canada, the FDA, Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission and Transport Canada, to name a few. Responsible for all audits of Canadian Blood Services, internal and external, Shaw was already a skilled manager of people and processes. As he watched one of his colleagues go through the MAOL, noting subtle and effective shifts in his style of interaction and ways of creating business momentum, Shaw began to consider that MAOL might also be the next step for him.

“It wasn’t that I simply wanted to learn to be a better manager,” Shaw says. “I wanted to learn how to explore being a more effective leader.”

For his MAOL breakthrough initiative, Shaw is directing Canadian Blood Services into an audit solution that has the potential to deliver higher revenue to his organization while improving efficiency. Where in the past Canadian Blood Services has had three different groups that conduct separate audit activities, Shaw has worked with his team to unify the processes, bringing together all stakeholders. This program is far more focused on helping each sector improve and be more effective than it is on compliance, Shaw says, which will aid in delivering improved services.

Since beginning his studies Shaw has found himself applying MAOL techniques in every aspect of his personal and professional life. The principle of generous listening, he says, has revolutionized the way that he interacts with his team and the kinds of solutions they are able to produce.

Shaw says that taking it as a given that people are going to come out with brilliant ideas as opposed to endeavoring to prescribe everything in advance has tremendous value and takes the group as a whole far beyond average thinking. Shaw has seen that another benefit of this technique lies in developing buy-in along the way.

“Buy-in is what gets people motivated and excited and want to join you wherever you’re headed,” he explains. “We had some principles around what we wanted to do on the audit program and what that would be. We unleashed the creative powers of the people on the ground level to actually design what that’s going to look like in the future and it’s gone way beyond things that I had thought of at the outset of the program.”

Through the MAOL, Shaw has experienced tremendous personal growth because, he says, the MAOL is a highly customizable experience. Though he has been through traditional business programs and courses in which he has learned plenty of prescribed material that has helped him in his career, the MAOL has been a catalyzing experience in that everything is applicable, interesting, and selected by the candidate himself.

“A lot of what comes out of it is about you as an individual and you as an individual leader,” Shaw notes. “It’s your interests and what sparks your leadership initiative and what you are trying to accomplish that the concepts and the principles and learnings from the MAOL get shaped into.”